


The Love Philosophy of Oods

by kayliemalinza



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Gen, ood, slight gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-01-29
Updated: 2009-01-29
Packaged: 2017-10-27 06:07:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/292456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kayliemalinza/pseuds/kayliemalinza
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack ruminates while trapped with Toshiko in a battle zone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Love Philosophy of Oods

**Author's Note:**

> You'll need to have seen the DW S4 episode "Planet of the Ood" to understand this.

Jack pops the top of the soda and guzzles it down heavy swallow through heavy swallow. "Hate this stuff," he mutters but it's the only source of energy around and when it's finished he wipes the last of carbonation from his lips. The ochre sugar smear is going to make his knuckles sticky, but what here _won't_ make him sticky? Coagulating blood and disintegrated bits of Ood. This is not a good vacation spot.

Toshiko is snoring softly and propped up by the door, her computer tilted halfway off her lap. Like this, it looks like her computer has has tilted halfway _onto_ her lap, like her machine is an overexerted toddler who fell, literally, asleep. Her hand is even resting lightly on the lid of it, fingers curled as if around a downy skull.

The Ood-corpse nearest Jack has fingers curled up too, but they are slack and empty. The brain is plump beside them and Jack picks up the brain to hold it, cradled and careful in the palm of his hand. Jack thinks the brain might still be alive somehow, even though the brainstem is dangling. It's tubed and fleshy like an umbilical cord, and if Jack is honest with himself, he's always liked the idea of an umbilical cord. A belly button is inconspicuous but it's proof that in the beginning you were sheltered and embraced. Things that splinter cold and lonely from an egg are doomed to stay that way, but a human comes from the inside of another human and Jack is always trying to get back there. He burrows in the birth canal and suckles every nipple he can reach. He doesn't know how Ood are born but he's seen them give away their brains. He's seen them standing with their brainstems wrapped around each other's wrists and a species that does that, he thinks, must know a lot about embracing.

When Toshiko saw the species for the first time, she was terrified. Jack knew she was mapping her brain onto the Ood's, imagining her best asset exposed and able to be plucked, not stowed away inside her locked-up skull, not contained in her, unreachable, not the hard kernel of internal _me_ that she is used to. She looked terrified but that means, Jack thinks, that she gets it. She understands that carrying your brain on the outside changes how you fit into the universe. She was as gentle with the Ood as she could be and when Jack was gentle, too, she kissed him on the corner of his lips.

Jack has been in Cardiff long enough to parse the meaning of her gesture, but he still tends to overthink it. Using a brain to stand for thought and knowledge is the only Earth metonymy that makes sense to Jack, and it baffled him for decades that the heart could mean emotion. It pumps blood, for goodness' sake. What does a muscled piston have to do with love? Why is there significance in kissing? A kiss is how you slake your curiosity: the taste and texture of a thing, how it moves and whether it is hot or cold. Babies explore the world with lips and tongue; that doesn't mean they love or want to bed it.

Jack has adapted to the Earth philosophy of kissing better than he has the symbol of the heart, but where he is from they think romantically about the palms of people's hands. A hand is what you use to manipulate and reach, to push and pull along. You can't hold a person's hand without them holding yours, and you can crush or cut them with your nails, but the palm is helpless. It's at the center. It is tough but sensitive and it is always getting touched.

When Toshiko kissed him, Jack cupped his hand around the corner of her jaw. Not to hold her there (Toshiko is like a rabbit, you must leave her room to flick away or she will break her bones) but just to feel the pressure of her skin against his palm. He wishes he could explain this to her, wishes that he could ask her to run her nails along the creases and press her thumbpad to the middle. If he were an Ood, he would hand to her the jellied coils of his brain. He trusts her.

She was not surprised to see him gentle; she was touched.


End file.
